Im not talking about difficulty in this post but time.
Why is it time sinks are creeping in more and more into the game?
Why do limited time events feature massive grinds or absurd drops like remix and plunder?
Why does crafting have weeks of time gated quests just to make useful and desired items?
Why do time limited events have a trickle of currency like the prepatch or mythic plus being nerfed to push more crest farming?
It doesn’t have to be this way…you can respect our time. Most of us would like to have alts. Pinky promise. The shadowlands grind cycle should stay in shadowlands.
WoW went from being a pretty in-depth game, that we’d spend hours on, to being 13~minutes of flashing lights, AoE spamming arcade game aimed at players who don’t want to play WoW but instead would be better suited to Diablo.
The whole point of an MMO is it’s meant to be in-depth.
They catered to 1 crowd, blindly, and backed themselves into a corner, and now are trying to find ways to rectify it in the age of “MAU’s” and time metrics being more valuable than revenue.
They did “respect your time” at the cost of everyone else’s, and the games core.
Once it became a speed run simulator, they had to pad it out with artificial time gates in everything since Legion.
We always had time gates but they were organic, gear drop %'s, RNG, luck.
This games content used to be 90% leveling, and it was hundreds of hours of quality, challenging content that could be tackled solo or coop seamlessly.
Also stop timegating everything. I can live with some FOMO in the game. But the timegating has to stop. A system that was meant to protect casuals has actually done the opposite.
Well, because while a casual game is in theory really good for us, doing stuff when we want and once we are done we can just take a long break and come back when there are new things we want to do, it’s terrible for Blizzard.
DAU/WAU is the bread and butter of live services, so most of the content they add has to be made with the insurance that we will be logging in every day, multiple times a day, for many hours. It’s rough, but it’s industry standard pretty much, with a few notable exceptions here and there.
There’s a few major ways companies are developing games. The way Bliz opted for is the way of the mobile game. 10 minutes of content timegated to make it an hour.
Yeah, it’s one of the downsides of widely available information. Humans are already pretty goal driven, the problem gets exarcebated when your goals are suddenly very, very clear. When people realized that only a small fraction of the game truly “mattered” and the information became widespread as the internet became more accessible, there wasn’t much more to be done, the damage was done and Blizzard chose which aspect of the game they wanted to maintain.
Same problem with hyper optimization, you don’t technically need a meta build to clear up to a +10, just a workable one, but with talent loadouts, cheat sheets with stats, basic rotation, BiS gear and such being so widely available, it’s straight up disrespectful to bring anything but the best. MMOs nowadays either have a plethora of horizontal content in an attempt to sway people from only focusing on one aspect of the game, either as side content like FFXIV/ESO or as the full experiences like GW2, OR they go full on vertical like WoW and Destiny 2, embracing most players borderline degenerate need to power game.
It has overall, but I think the events that happen at specific times with lengthy gaps between can be very frustrating for time limited players.
For myself as an example, I typically get an hour or so to play after work, maybe 30-45 to hop on after dinner, and then usually 1.5 hours before bed.
With an event like the siege on dragonbane keep in DF, there are some days where I simply can’t do it, or I have choose between doing that or doing something like running a key, even though my total time window should allow plenty of time to do both, but the timing on siege falls right in the middle.
I just don’t understand the reasoning on putting long timers on things that typically have once per week rewards anyway. Or in the case of this pre-patch event, just let the bosses spawn frequently so people can farm them if they want. Who cares, the gear is garbage anyway.
Corp KPIs. Investors want profits so company has to think of way to introduce ‘‘additional’’ measures to ‘‘engage’’ their primary audiences, get new ones and stop old one from leaving.
Time lengthening measures are good for them in the sense it gets 2/3 of the above. FOMO for engagement and the more you sink time in Blizz’s services and products, the less you spend on their competitors. The latter is also a approach used by many companies worldwide, Apple vs Samsung, NVIDIA vs AMD vs Intel etc etc, Instagram vs X etc.
They shouldn’t copy other MMO’s. Copy a good game like Elden Ring.
Just make the game harder. People are way better at WoW than they used to be. But instead of making only the very end game harder make leveling harder.
If players complain that they can’t get to max level because they keep dying, tell them to get good.
You were doing well until you got here. Shadowlands had “Threads of Fate” to make leveling alts easy. The complain about covenants and borrowed power were not from the causal side, they were from the high level dungeon / raid end game people who would rather be full level full gear on day one.
